Chip designers perform many types of operations on layouts of electronic designs with rulers in order to, for example, edit shapes or measure shape dimensions, spacing, etc. All such operations offered by EDA (electronic design automation) vendors are restricted to a single die, i.e., measuring distances between two points on one die. More recent electronic designs include three-dimensional integrated circuit designs (3DIC) or pseudo-three-dimensional (2.5D) integrated circuit designs where dies are arranged in an out-of-plane direction. These integrated circuit (IC) dies and shapes therein need to be properly aligned and arranged with respect to each other in order for the end product to function correctly or as intended. Even a single die design may include multiple metal layers, whereas some conventional EDA tools either present one metal layer of these multiple metal layers as an editable layer and the remaining metal layers as an overlaid background image that cannot be edited or selected for any layout operations.
Some other conventional EDA tools provide a co-design environment and present each metal layer of these multiple metal layers in separate design windows. For example, a first, editable metal layer may be presented in a first window, a second, editable metal layer is presented in a second window, etc. In each of these separate windows, only one metal layer is editable, and the remaining layers on the same die or on different dies are either not presented at all or presented as a background image. These background images of electronic designs may be located at the correct locations, and they may often be presented as a dimmed or partially-translucent images. Nonetheless, design components (e.g., shapes) in these background images are not active or selective and thus provide viewing purposes only without enabling a designer to select any part of the components in these background images, which may cause the designer to introduce layout mistakes when going back and forth between metal layers and create more manual correction by the designer.
Therefore, there exists a need for a method, system, and computer program product for implementing three-dimensional operations for electronic designs.